My research deals with how we inhabit, move through, form, and (re)(con)figure bodies: physical bodies, bodies of a place (geography), bodies of language (e.g. how we take up language), relational bodies (e.g. the ways in which relationships have/hold their own/unique bodily forms).
Specifically, i am interested in the ways bodies and languages -- especially queer and trans bodies, mixed race bodies, gender fluid bodies, and “uncategorizable” bodies spill (out) across space and time as a means of resisting and refusing mechanisms of control.
i work with intangible materials including time, movement, and relationality to create unstable gestures that are unfixed in form but residual in the body.
i create afterimages.
With commitments to queer of color critique, performance studies, experimental dance histories, and diy archival practices, my work questions the acts and affects of observation, witnessing, and surveillance.
Through experiential encounters mediated by the camera, i transgress the container of the physical body and practice “stepping out of the linearity of straight time,” as José Esteban Muñoz articulates in Cruising Utopia.
As both filmmaker and performer, i abstract my bodily form in an effort to expand beyond my own body - a gesture connected to Muñoz's articulations of queerness as horizon, as “something that is not yet here.”
My experimental videos are both an archive and a reaching-into the future — a series of marks made in the temporal past that leak-spill-bleed into a queer horizon. My work also engages with “the surfaces of bodies 'surface' as an effect of the impressions left by others,” as queer feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes in Cultural Politics of Emotion. What do histories of the self, and histories of place, impress upon us through our bodily movements, and how? How do we translate and transfer these impressions to one another, with and without touch?